Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Current Fashions in Museum display by Salon 254

The following was reported in Salon 254 from the Society of Antiquaries

'Current fashions in museum display

Fellow John Blair’s thoughts in the last issue of Salon on new museum displays and the regrettable sidelining of people with real knowledge in their planning and execution, struck a chord with many Fellows.

Fellow Lucilla Burn (whose own much-lauded reorganisation of the Fitzwilliam’s collection of Greek and Roman antiquities was a model of how such things should be done) responded to say: ‘My impression is that a lively debate about museum displays, including many of the issues that exercise John Blair, is already in existence. But maybe it takes place too much amongst members of the museum community and within the pages of the Museums Journal, and not everyone who would like to voice an opinion feels he or she has a place to do so.

‘May I draw Fellows' attention to a conference we are holding in Cambridge on 23 September 2011, called “The Past on Display”, where academics and interested members of the public will be joining curators, designers and conservators to air their views? Details will be announced in mid-May, but meanwhile anyone interested in seeing the programme is most welcome to email me.’ (Salon will include further details of the conference in the next issue.)

Fellow Catherine Johns responded to say: ‘As I read through John Blair's comments about museum display, I found myself nodding and murmuring “hear, hear” at almost every line. No museum display is going to be perfect for everyone, from the primary-school pupil to the international scholar, but the people who can best create excellent exhibitions that interest and inform a wide range of museum visitors are the curators, who know their own collections and their own typical visitors well.

‘These days, people can find information on and illustrations of museum objects in many different sources: books, TV programmes and internet sites. These sources vary from good to appalling. Only in a museum can people see the actual objects in the flesh, and communicate with the curators who know that material and carry out the original research on it, and whose views on the artefacts are based on sound, up-to-date knowledge and experience. Inserting woolly, distorting layers of “interpretation” between curators and the public is a hugely retrograde step.

‘I have it on good authority that in one major museum, some website content has recently been written by individuals who obtained their information from Wikipedia rather than from the curators. What’s the point? Some Wikipedia articles are good, and some are not; but even the best articles MUST (by Wikipedia’s own rules) be based on reliable published information, which must be cited, and therefore MUST NOT incorporate original, unpublished research. Visitors to museums expect the information they are given to be authoritative and based on first-hand scholarship. The best and most up-to-date museum labelling contains new, original research, by authoritative scholars, often long before it is published.’

Fellow Martin Henig continues in the same vein: ‘Far too often one is spoon-fed with one view, one “story” about the evidence to the exclusion of others. We do indeed have biased and dumbed-down views of the Middle Ages, as John Blair says, but Roman Britain is not exempt by any means. It is impossible to take a party of engaged students to Bath for example and discuss with them different options concerning the development of the sanctuary; I far prefer taking them to Lydney Park with a site free from modern clutter and an old-fashioned but excellent site museum.

‘When I started to lecture on Greek art in Oxford early in my career, I could take students to the Ashmolean to see a magnificent assemblage of Greek vases chronologically arranged, and an accessible reserve collection. Now there are very few vases on display and the labelling is too often geared to modern (sometimes quirky) prejudice. From the Medieval display, one would not have supposed that Oxford has one of the finest collections of medieval pots, some of them excavated by Lawrence before “Arabia” was added to his name!

‘My conclusion is that museums increasingly discount scholarship and serious research in favour of entertainment or half-baked educational theories. It is sad and this decline in standards stretches far beyond museums touching every aspect of our cultural life. What do we expect in a country where culture is so seriously devalued in favour of football and other spectator sports?’'